Continuing advances in storage technology provide significant amounts of digital data to be stored cheaply and efficiently. However, there are many situations where data (e.g., user data or corporate data) needs to be stored in a database for a significant amount of time, such as years or even decades. For example, in the United States, certain federal and state laws require that all medical institutions store medical data (e.g., medical history, medical care, regular check-ups and monitoring, etc.) on patients during his or her lifetime, or even longer. Moreover, similar requirements apply to banking and financial institutions. For example, according to international rules (e.g., the Basel Agreement), banks are required to keep all financial information for a certain period of time (e.g., data relating to accounts, customers, performed transactions and other information about movement of funds, etc.). In these situations, financial, medical and other organizations are required to store huge amounts of data.
Being required to store large amounts of data for long periods of time creates problems in that it is necessary not only to preserve this information, but also to ensure the integrity and reliability. Moreover, over long periods of time, the data may be subject to a number of threats, including, for example, potential damage by software and/or hardware failure, accidental and/or intentional removal or modification, modification or tampering by fraudsters, and the like.
Furthermore, when using third party storage services, entities often realize that these third party storage vendors may provide varying levels of service and that each service provider may present different user interfaces, interactions, and storage rules. Moreover, these different requirements may change over time, which only further complicates the building of applications and services that depend on the third party storage vendors. As a result, dependence on multiple third party storage vendors and local storage may make it difficult to ensure performance requirements, such as enforcing service level agreements of the applications and the users.
Accordingly, what is needed is a more efficient and unitary system and method for an end user to remotely manage data storage and verification with third party services, such as cloud storage services and blockchain networks.